We are thrilled to announce the Buildify 2016 finalists: five projects that are leading the way in the socially and environmentally sustainable architectural practice. You can play a meaningful role to help accelerate their challenges - become a buildifyer!

In summer 2016, Buildify’s first Call For Submissions received an incredible response with more than 80 projects being submitted from various continents. These submissions represented an impressive spectrum of architectural front-runners working to positively impact lives.

In September, we selected a long-list of 28 projects that are currently featured on our homepage. The long-list was presented to our alliance partners and together with our seven jury members, we selected 5 entries that we consider to be exemplary Buildify projects.

Jury Process

Since its founding, AiD has been entirely supported by a team of committed and talented volunteers and our jury team is no exception. Our jurors for Buildify 2016 represent a range of innovators in the field of architecture and development. Each of our jurors brought a unique perspective and set of experiences to the selection process. Our panel of jurors included:

Emiliano Gandolfi/ Italy: an architect and independent curator, director of the Curry Stone Design Prize and co-founder of Cohabitation Strategies.

Matt Nohn/ Germany: an urban economist and development planner who serves as Lead Specialist for people-driven housing at The World Bank, Loeb Fellow at Harvard and capacity building expert at UN-Habitat.

Architectural Added Value: Does the proposed architecture add value to the local community’s existing socio-cultural capital?

Team: What is the capacity of the team in terms of the strength of its local social network and its multi-disciplinary global collaboration potential?

Feasibility: Does the project have a viable development model for its context and will the project benefit from access to the global network of AiD?

Impact: Will the project add to the long-term development capacity of the community and does it address an urgent need?

Supported by the deliberations of the jurors, the jury and AiD leadership team’s evaluations moved us to select five initiatives as our Buildify 2016 Finalists. These five proposals convinced us of their promise and potential to demonstrate best practices in community-driven architecture:

Buildify 2016 Finalists

Fairy Water Village Community Center/ Chen Zhou, China: The proposal deals with an urgent gap in China’s rural/ urban development, and is one of the few projects where the community took initiative in their own village development. We are intrigued by the community’s aspiration and the sophisticated plan, design and development tactics by the team.

Palenque Tambillo Cultural Center/ Tambillo, Ecuador: This compelling proposal emphasises the creation of added value in the local economy, ecology, cultural heritage and the community’s social life through an ambitious architectural proposal. We are convinced that there is great leadership and a strong network presented by the local community organisations and experts who have engaged local governments and other essential stakeholders.

ModSkool/ New Delhi, India: The proposal deals with an urgent, fundamental issue and introduces a minimal, temporary design solution. We believe it has great potential to improve the learning environment of the affected communities.

Cultural Factory of Atucucho/ Quito, Ecuador: The proposal presents a holistic, systematic approach to positively change the local building production and community co-operation. We are impressed by the multi-layered stakeholders developed by the project leaders, and are very interested in seeing this pilot case become a viable model for local communities in similar contexts.

Centre for Urban Poor Consortium/ Parung, Regency of Bogor, Indonesia: The proposal introduces a small-scale architectural intervention that helps foster sustainable development in a challenging context. We believe in the ground work carried out by the local community architects and are curious to see how the local supported networks, trust, sense of belonging and identify will be further developed throughout the process.

What's next?

The selected initiatives will be presented as five challenges. AiD will support these project teams as network partner, help them to generate maximum exposure, and personally engage our global community and Buildify Alliance partners and expert pool in contributing to the realisation of the challenges.

At AiD, our strength is in our global network. These projects need you in order to reach their potential and model a new way forward for socially sustainable architecture!